Basic New Years Resolutions

Come New Years, many folks form grandiose resolutions to lose weight, eat healthy, exercise, cut all carbs/fats/sugars/etc, get in shape, find love, write a novel, win the superbowl, start a political revolution, and/or burn this mother down.  Yet not only do so many of us fail at these massive goals, but even find ourselves actively regressing.

It's not that I want to discourage grandiose goals, far from it--the more ambitious, the better.  Rather, I would just like to suggest a few super-basic New Years resolutions, certain very simple lines you can refuse to cross, so that if you don't exactly reach your goals this year, you can at least be sure that you do not regress.  For example:

• You can refuse to eat alone at a fast food restaurant. 

Note that I didn't say cut all fast food entirely from your diet and lose weight--that would be an ambitious goal, and a worthy one, too. I'm just saying that in the meantime, until you achieve that goal, a very easy line you can refuse to cross is to eat alone at a fast food restaurant.

You can even still eat alone in your car at the drive-thru, or carry it back to your place to eat alone, or even eat alone at a nice restaurant; but there's just a certain pathetic sadness, a pitiful sense of resignation and defeat, that comes from voluntarily entering a fast-food place, ordering the food, and then just sitting all alone at a booth to eat it, as though you didn't have a single better thing to do--or person to be with--in the whole wide world.  Don't be that person.  Maintain that minimal base-line dignity, it can go a long ways towards improving your sense of self-worth in other areas too, trust me.

• You can not carry a box of cookies to snack on wherever you go.

Story time: A friend once told me of a college roommate who carried Keebler elf cookies in his backpack wherever he went--he didn't eat them so much as inhaled them.  He also kept his closet carefully locked at all times, even requesting that my friend leave the room when he wanted to open it.  This of course filled my friend with insatiable curiosity, like his dorm was suddenly some Gothic novel!  And indeed, one day my friend came home to find the closet unlocked.  Burning with anticipation, he turned the knob, flung it open, and inside were...Keebler elf cookies!  Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, nothing but elf cookies.  Not unsurprisingly, this roommate was also dangerously obese.

Again, note that I don't say you should suddenly cut all cookies and/or sugar from your life--that would also be a worthwhile goal, one that I certainly haven't achieved yet.  But in the meantime, until you get to that point, you can refuse to be the sort of person who carries a box of cookies with you wherever you go.  You can even still keep cookies at home as comfort food if you must, just not on your person at all times.  Maintain that basic level of self-dignity.

• You can refuse to eat at a Mexican restaurant that serves sour cream with absolutely everything.

I used to say to only eat at Mexican restaurants with Spanish words in them ("Michoacana" stands a good chance of being good; "el Taco shack" sends up serious red flags; and something like "Larry's Mexican Grill" should be avoided at all costs; even Del Taco, with its grammatically-nonsensical name, still at least contains Spanish words, and not-coincidentally has OK tacos), but then I ate a place in Vancouver, WA called El Tapatio, and it was literally the worst.  What can one do?

The best I've come up with is to analyze the menu: if near every menu item comes with a side of sour cream, ditch it.  Mexicans in Mexico never eat sour cream, sour cream is gross and disgusting and you should feel gross and disgusting for eating it, and that same level of gross and disgusting carries over to their other food, too.  Have some slightly higher standards with your Mexican--avoid places that serve sour cream.

• You can refuse to wear sweatpants and/or PJs outside the house post-High School.

We all did it.  No shame in it.  We wore our PJs to school some bleary, winter mornings.  We were almost making a statement of sorts, against the vanity of fashion and the suffocating impositions of decorum, by showing up to homeroom in our sweatpants.

But at some point in our maturity it is not enough to simply make a statement, no, one must also act--and the great revolts of history were not accomplished in sweats.  Even dirty hippies protesting Vietnam at least put on some denim in the morning.  At some point, wearing PJs all day long becomes less a sign of protest than of resignation and self-defeat.  Again, this is not to speak out against sweats or PJs in the least--few pleasures are greater than lounging around a warm fire place on a winter's eve clad only in plaid.  I'm just saying that, for the sake of your self-respect, to change into something else to wear outside the house once you've reached legal voting age.

And perhaps closely related to this is: college girls, you can choose not to wear black leggings every. single. day.  I understand that right now they are considered "fashionable" (whatever that means); I understand that they're "comfortable" (though I confess I've never associated tight-clothing with comfort); and I understand that it's hell finding flattering, form-fitting jeans.  And again, I'm not even saying to quit wearing leggings altogether, I'm not so quixotic as that.  I'm just suggesting, maybe at least once a week, you put on a pair of pants, or even just throw a skirt over your leggings.  Practice that baseline level of self-respect.  See how you feel.

I Really Want To Root For Oregon This New Years...

...you know, have a team from my Pacific Northwest win the first-ever college football playoffs and finally humble the arrogant SEC.  But then, arrogant sadly describes Oregon too, doesn't it.

But even laying aside for now the character failings of the Duck's obnoxious fan base, part of why I'm finding it difficult to root for Oregon this year is because their grad student Union had to straight-up go on strike this month in order to win a compensation package that is still even worse than mine.  Considering the literal millions that Nike pours into Oregon's athletics each year, that shabby treatment of the grad students who do the actual teaching is utterly unconscionable. 

And University of Oregon is supposed to be one of the good guys!  Right?  Eugene in most folks' imaginations is grouped together with, say, Berkley, or Greenwich Village, as one of those havens for ultra-leftist thought (Eugene had not one but two separate Occupy encampments back in 2011).  If even they have student labor problems and horridly misplaced spending priorities, then what of the rest of us?

I fear that if Oregon finally defeats the SEC this year, it will only because they will have become an SEC team in all but name, which would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.   Combined with the repressed concussion reports and fake-classes scandals and excused sexual assault and general de-emphasis on academics, each year makes it more and more difficult for me to watch college football in good conscience. 

Happy Holidays

Fall semester 2011, I had this soft-spoken Muslim student, a refugee from Iraq.  Didn't speak much.  I asked her idly one December day, during a workshop, if there was a Muslim equivalent to Christmas; she said yes, the Day of Ashura, which in 2011 fell on that very day, December 5th.  Everyone in class immediately felt bad that she was in class (though we were also kinda impressed).  I told her that had I known about it, I would have totally excused her absence.  She just shrugged in that inimitable way that I'm pretty sure only war refugees can do.

In any case, to any and all Muslims out there, for what it's worth, I hope you had a Happy Day of Ashura.

Moreover, to all of my various Jewish friends out there, including those of you who've kindly invited me over to light the Menorah, I hope you are having a Happy Hanukkah right now.

And of course, to the super-majority of my friends who either self-identify as Christian or are of Christian decent, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

And to my Orthodox, Catholic, and/or Latin-American friends, I hope that that Merry Christmas extends through the Enunciation, as well.

Tis the season when some otherwise-well-intentioned folks I know demand indignantly of those who say Happy Holidays, "What's wrong with saying 'Merry Christmas,' huh?!"

Nothing's wrong with it.  It's just that I want to include the rest of this breath-taking mass of humanity too.

Happy Holidays.

My Way

Once in awhile, you can post Frank Sinatra's "My Way" unironically.

For this was hands down my hardest semester ever you see--and it was entirely self-inflicted.  I took four graduate-level classes (five if you count Teacher Training), including two seminars, one of which was the infamous Walt Whitman seminar.  This was all in a frankly reckless bid to finish the last of my doctoral course work in only two years flat.  I was advised explicitly against such a foolhardy load by my adviser, at least one classmate straight-up laughed in my face when he learned I was doing it, while another said that whenever he got stressed-out this semester, he just took comfort in the fact that at least he wasn't me.

Moreover, part way through the semester, I learned that the undergrad Spanish class I took last Spring, more than just fulfilling my foreign language requirement, actually did count towards my credit hours, and thus I hadn't actually needed to take 4 classes after all!  But by then I was already in too deep; now my pride was on the line, and it was less that I needed to prove to others that I could do it, than that I needed to prove it to myself.

This all came to a head throughout the month of November, when I realized that if I had any hope of finishing these four papers (two 20-pagers, two 10-pagers), that I needed to start on them now.  My Fall Break was one in name only, as I stressed out each day trying to churn out a complete rough draft of each.

I did.  I turned them all in.  Early.  I'm really tired now, and have never needed a month-long Christmas break more than I do now.

Although I did sleep in every day--I arranged my schedule that way.  That's right, I slept in all the time and was still uber-productive, so suck on that Stephen Covey.  I also took all Sunday's off.  Every single one.  I did it my way, indeed.  As such, I'm pretty I have earned the right to sing sincerely, with feeling, that there were times, I'm sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew.  But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate up, and spit it out.  I faced it all, and I stood tall, and did it myyyy waaaayyyy!

Update:  Grades now posted.  Straight A's.  My first 4.0 at Iowa.   And more, what's more than this, I did it myyy waaayyy!

Hamlet as a Christmas Play

Embedded within Andy William's Holiday supermarket-radio standard "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", lurks the line: "They'll be scary ghost stories/and tales of the glories/of Christmases long, long ago..."  In what is otherwise an unadulterated work of Christmas schmaltz--so sugary sweet it'll rot your teeth--that line has always jumped out at me like, well, a ghost, for as long as I can remember.  

"Scary ghost stories"?  Since when is that a Christmas tradition--and not only a tradition, but one supposedly as seasonal as mistletoe and caroling?

Apparently not all that long ago it was a legit thing we did--and Andy William's 1963 hit probably debuted right at the tale-end of our collective memory of that storied tradition.  In 1891, British humorist Jerome K. Jerome purportedly said: "Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories...Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres."  Evidently in Victorian England--the source of all our other modern-day yuletide practices--the "scary ghost stories" were as much a hallmark of the Christmas season as the stockings, the trees, the holly, the carols, and jolly ol' St. Nich.

It is of course no coincidence that Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story--and far less well known is that Dickens also published many other ghost stories for Christmas ("The Signal-Man" is a good one I had to read for a class last year).  Also, James Joyce's 1914 story "The Dead", wherein a middle-aged Irish professor learns that his wife still pines for her lover who died at 17--that is, he learns the dead are still with us--likewise takes place during a Christmas party.  It apparently used to be the rule, not the exception, to contemplate the dead on Christmas.

So why did the ghost stories disappear so thoroughly from the Holidays? Partly it may be that modern-day Halloween siphoned off all the ghost stories (at least here in America, anyways); partly it might have to do with the fact that we don't tell any stories on Christmas Eve anymore--a solid half-century of Holiday movies and TV specials has taken care of that; partly it may be that few believe in (or admit to believing in) actual ghosts anymore; partly it's yet another sign of how our cowardly modern age refuses to face death; and partly it may just finally have seemed a little gauche to discuss death during a holiday that celebrates a Birth.

But on the other hand, "scary ghost stories" fit right in with Christmas, in their own sort of way.  The holiday does occur right after Winter Solstice, when the nights are longer than any other time of year--and thus when the dark things have the longest time to haunt them, no matter how bright our festive lights might try to shoo 'em away.  That Birth also portends a rather spectacular Death, as you might recall--and not just any death either, but literally the Death to end all Deaths.  Christmas is a day, then, to remember how close death is to us--and of what awaits us after death, too. 

Which brings me to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is also a ghost story--and early in the biting (December?) cold of Act I, Marcellus the palace guard, in trying to understand the ghost's sudden appearance and just as sudden disappearance, exclaims:

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
-Hamlet Act I.i.181-187

Now, perhaps Marcellus here is simply running his mouth in a frothing panic, just trying to call to mind all the disparate ghost-lore he knows in trying to understand this fearsome apparition...or, perhaps Marcellus is calmly hypothesizing that the ghost disappeared because it is the Christmas season, "Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated," when ghosts have the least power to walk the earth.  For apparently on Christmas, "no spirit dares stir abroad, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm."  Perhaps that is why the English were so cavalier to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve--they maybe believed that this was the one night a year when the ghosts had no power to haunt them.  

That also means it would truly take a powerful ghost with a terrible purpose--say, Prince Hamlet's murdered father, "murdered most foul"--to be able to walk the Earth during Christmas season.  Truly, something must be rotten in the state of Denmark for a ghost to appear during Christmas.

Now, I'm not here to make a call for a return to Holiday ghost stories or what have you--we in the U.S. get quite enough of that on Halloween, like I said.  Besides, I actually kinda like our modern conception of Christmas as the time of year when we stake out our brightest lights against our darkest night, when we unequivocally proclaim our faith in new birth in the face of winter's total death, when we deign not to even acknowledge the ghosts, so confident are we in the coming return to life.  No, my ambitions this Christmas are a more modest:

I would just like to see a Christmas production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

I think it would be spectacular to see a Christmas tree in the background when Claudius proclaims victory over Fortinbras, or when Prince Hamlet cries "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh would melt..." maybe while handling an unopened gift.  I'd like to see holly strung about when the players perform their play within a play.  I'd love to see Prince Hamlet contemplatively handle a Baby Jesus figurine from a small, nearby Nativity scene while he recites the famous "To be or not to be, that is the question..."  And when Ophelia appears, I'd love to see an ironic sprig of mistletoe overhead when she tries to give back loving "remembrances of yours/That I have longèd long to redeliver" while he shouts back angrily "get thee to a nunnery!"  And I cannot think of a more hauntingly beautiful setting for Ophelia's suicide than under a flickering Christmas light display.  Oh yes, I think it would be absolutely lovely to see a Christmas production of Hamlet with full seasonal decorations, one that explicitly foregrounds the "scary ghost stories" of Christmases long, long ago.

If someone knows of some such production, won't you please drop me a line?

On Joy

A bunch of us grad students were gathered around our Thanksgiving table, discussing a recent work meeting where the ice-breaker had been "Tell us something that brings you joy."

It was a surprisingly difficult question--and I only half-facetiously said "I can't remember!" at the time.  Most folks answered things like playing with their kids, or reading for pleasure (remember that?), or playing sports, or listening to music or what have you.  But none of these responses felt...genuine, however.  Or at least not equal to the question, which I'm not even sure the asker fully understood.

As we discussed the question over our Thanksgiving turkey, we grad students localized what it was that threw us off about that question: it was the fact that what everyone had enumerated was not joy, but pleasure. 

Now, before I continue, I must emphasize that pleasure is by no means a bad thing, in and of itself; I reject the old Puritan notion that all pleasure is suspect.  Nevertheless, pleasure is still not joy; also, pleasure has a come down afterwords, whether that's a hangover, or the endorphin crash after sports, or the fleeting sense of loss once the last of the chocolate is eaten or the beauty product wears off.  Pleasure by its very nature is fleeting, and even in the best of circumstances has a quiet undercurrent of melancholy to it.

Again, that by no means signifies that pleasure should be renounced, or rejected, or not pursued.  Heaven forbid!  Some days, our favorite little pleasures are all that keep us sane. But that is not joy.

Moreover, pleasure, unlike joy, can be planned, budgeted, arranged, counted upon--I shall play basketball tonight, or go out for a drink on Friday, or whatever.  Pleasure is thus part of the status quo, the regularly scheduled, the normal, the ordinary.  Again, this is not a knock on either pleasure or the ordinary; in this tumultuous world of ours, what we often need most is that stability, that reassurance, that reliable organization, that comforting routine.

But even the best of routines is still a routine.  And sometimes what we need most is that which upsets our routines, yes, even the best ones!

And that's where joy comes in!  For Joy cannot be planned for.

Joy, in many ways, is analogous to tragedy, in that no one plans on tragedy, no one expects or schedules for illness or earthquakes or hurricanes or car crashes or sudden death.  Not a single Shakespearean tragedy opens with a character expecting a pile of dead bodies on the stage by the end of Act V.  No one woke up on September 11th expecting to see the two towers come tumbling to the ground. In Baudrillardian terms, pleasure is a non-event, while tragedy is an absolute event.  Tragedy is the utterly unexpected that upsets and changes everything.

The reason so many people come to retroactively see tragedies as blessings is because the tragedy changed things--sometimes permanently!  "It was a wake-up call," goes the cliche after a tragedy, because pleasure and routine had lulled us to sleep; tragedy shook us awake.

But here's the blessed thing--so does joy!  Joy, even more so than cursed tragedy, can be just the wake-up call we need, if we are willing to let it.  Joy cannot be planned, budgeted, arranged, scheduled, or anticipated--it can only be embraced and experienced when it comes.  And that 's why the ice-breaker "name something that brings you joy" annoyed us so--because joy, by it's very nature, cannot be named!  It is not something that we can turn to reliably, because then it would be routine, not a routine-breaker, a disrupter, a game-changer.

Joy is an absolute event, one where nothing can be the same afterwords.  Pleasure is meant to be forgotten, while joy is something that is always remembered!   Joy, then, is revolutionary, radical, subversive.  No wonder we spend so much time avoiding joy at all costs--it is bigger than us.

So then, in the interest of giving thanks on this most recent Thanksgiving (and looking forward to this Christmas season where we all sing "Joy to the World!"), I want to share what I wish I'd responded with instead to that icebreaking question, with the moments that always bring me joy, even (maybe especially) in their remembrance:

-The day I threw Catch-22 into the air at 17, because Yossarian got away.
-The first moment I saw the Guajataca on Hwy 6 along the north shore of Puerto Rico.
-Every single baptism in Puerto Rico, when I feared each time that this time I wouldn't feel it, that I would finally recognize that I'd faked it every time, that it wouldn't be real--but then I always felt it, everytime, all over me...
-When the cloud lifted from Huang Shan in central China after 2 days of white-out fog, and I saw the stunning vista of bamboo rain forest stretch out before me.
-When I walked along the beach of Sayulita, Mexico under the full moon, looking for a place to sleep.
-When I learned I could have quit my awful job for that dishonest sales company after all, when I learned my Grandpa had provided for me, and as I drove back to my apartment I beheld the sun set behind the Rockies and reflect off the amber fields of grain, and I felt move within me the assurance that God knew who I was...
-That all-too-rare house party I attended wherein everyone actually danced, actually fed off each others energy, actually enjoyed ourselves, and I dreamed good dreams that night for the first time in too long...

And many, many others I am sure I'm missing right now.  You can do things conducive to Joy (just as you can for tragedy, too), but you can't plan for it, only let it happen. 

Robi Draco Rosa AKA Draco Rosa AKA Draco AKA Robi Rosa AKA...

Robert Edward Rosa Suárez is perhaps the most important Puerto Rican singer you've never heard of. 

During my mission in Puerto Rico, the local teenagers (upon accurately deducing that all us young white kids were all probably Rock fans), would, in excited, reverential awe, share with us Robi Draco Rosa's cult-classic, 1996's Vagabundo (which I've fanboyed about previously here).  Its heavy guitar, exquisite musicianship, brooding fear of death, and perfect balance between Rock and Latin, was like nothing we'd heard before or since.  It quickly became a favorite among all the missionaries (especially the Anglo ones), such that when Rosa's long-belated followup Mad Love was released near the end of my mission, you can bet we all snatched that one up, too...

...even though at first glance, maybe we should have feared it as some sort of sell-out album; for as one can obviously see from the cover's clean haircut, pretty-boy face, and English-language music, Mad Love seemed an obvious, self-conscious attempt to mimic Ricky Martin's look and success.

And with good reason: Rosa is who produced and co-wrote some of Ricky Martin's greatest hits, of all people (including the "Living La Vida Loca" and "She Bangs," among other weary tracks that still linger on Adult Contemporary stations to this day).  What's more, both Rosa and Martin were in the same Latino boy-band Menudo back in the late-80s (where he went by the more boyish "Robi Rosa").  In fact, Rosa was a major mover and shaker in helping engineer the Latin Pop "revolution" (in the absolute loosest sense of the word) of the late '90s.  Was maybe this pretty-boy the real Rosa all along?  Was our beloved Vagabundo less a defiant turning-away from conformity and fame than a mere one-off aberration, one that exploited a cash-in counter-culture image as carefully calculated as any other Pop image?

The truth, as always, is far more complicated, beginning with the fact that Mad Love is first and foremost a really good album (though you still admittedly have to skip that awful opener "Dancing in the Rain").  There is nothing shallow or trivial about these love songs, but are all sustained, deep-sea dives into the vagaries of love-lost, the passions that can course through your veins, the turbulence that romance can wrack upon your soul.  The musicianship is complex, the production multi-layered, the singing soulful, the lyrics intelligent, the melodies infectious.  If the cover looked like yet another belated post-Ricky Martin cash-in, well, the music quickly belied it; though it won some Latin Grammys and sold well in Europe, it was ignored stateside--and no wonder, for these were not actually Pop songs, they were too passionate for radio.  Even when Rosa compromises, he is uncompromising.

For about a solid decade, Vagabundo and Mad Love were all I owned and needed of Rosa, not daring to hear anything else he'd recorded before or since; so indelibly were those two beloved albums associated with my mission, that I refused to allow anything else by Rosa to over-write my memories so profoundly associated with those 2 discs.  Moreover, there was simply so much other music in this wondrously-wide world to explore; Rosa simply faded from my mind.

But then, a decade from my homecoming passed, and on that milestone, I found my mind turning back more earnestly to Puerto Rico than it had in years.  Suddenly, I felt this profound need to reconnect with my Isla del Encanto; this involved calling people there I hadn't talked to in forever, and digitally scanning my old mission photos as an excuse to examine them anew--as well as finding out what happened to my old friend Robi Draco Rosa.

First, I learned that perhaps Vagabundo was not some experimental aberration after all, for post-Mad Love, Rosa broke all ties with Sony, shortened his name to the more menacing sounding Draco Rosa, and self-released Vino (also known in some territories as El teatro del absurdo) on his own indie-label, in an obvious attempt to recapture the magic of Vagabundo, where his heart had apparently been all along.  I was intrigued, and downloaded away.

To get out of the way: Vino does not recapture the magic of Vagabundo.  Though that's not for want of trying.  The dark tone and heavy guitars are reproduced well enough, and it has its moments of genius, but it's simply not the same.  This is not to imply that Vino is a failure, not by any stretch; "Todo Marcha Bien" alone is worth the price of admission, as is his piano cover of Bob Dylan's "One Too Many Mornings" (Vino's only English song), and the brooding Spanish "Aleluya" might almost convince you that maybe the world did in fact need yet another Leonard Cohen cover. Vino is still Rosa, who is constitutionally incapable of sucking. Like pizza, even when Rosa is bad, he's still good. I admire and recommend Vino. But part of the magic of Vagabundo was drawn from just how totally ambitious and daring it was, how new it was, what with its refusal to draw from familiar wells.  But Vino going back to the same ol' well, even Vagabundo's, does not spark the same ambition and inspiration and courage.

But give Rosa credit--he apparently realized the same thing, for only a year later, he shortened his name yet again, this time to just Draco, and did something radically different once more.  Most intriguingly, he accomplished the totally unexpected by doing the most familiar--he returned to Sony and did a traditional Puerto Rican album, singing songs in the style of Son, Bolero, and Salsa.  It is a lover letter to his native Puerto Rico.  It is probably his most adult album--for it is also his most soulful.  Just give "Esto es Vida" a listen, and feel the joy swell in your soul.  As I marked the decennial of my return from Puerto Rico, it was just what I needed. 

Unlike Vino, Amor Vincit Omnia (Latin for "love conquers all") finds Draco in a much better place, apparently at peace with the world and himself.  And perhaps it had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol or the trappings of fame or what have you, but simply that he finally found something new to inspire him. 

And just in time, too, because then he had a cancer scare.  Right now, he's making a full recovery, but a man takes stock of his after an event like that; and so, at the behest of his many musical friends, he released Vida just last year, a duets album.  Although Draco was never popular state-side, in case there was any doubt about his standing among Latino musicians, it features such luminaries as Ricky Martin, Shakira, Juanes, Jose Feliciano, and Mana, among many others. 

They cover songs from Vagabundo, Mad Love, Amor Vincit Omnia, (though only one from Vino), and even a song from his chillaxed, pre-Vagabundo solo album Frio.  This album is essentially a victory lap for Draco Rosa, as well as validation for anyone like me who's ever loved him while wondering if anyone else--Anglo or Latino--did as well.  And maybe this goes for all duets albums, but, well, Rosa just sounds so much less lonely on this album, as compared to others.  He's no longer a stay vagabond wondering the world, a solitary man in mad love--on Amor Omnia Vincit, he let down his guard just enough to sing "no tengo nada sin mis amigos" [I have nothing without my friends], and on Vida, he at last proves that he really did have friends all along.  The curse is lifted.

A note on his first solo album Frio, from 1994.  It was his first post-Menudo record, and thus it is fair to ask if there is even a hint on it of what was to come.  Short answer: yes.  Now, Sony still clearly had a lot of say in the direction Frio should take at this early juncture, and they pushed it decisively in the direction of easy listening.  There's even some latent, cheesy 80s synth on a few tracks, which, even if you've never listened to 80s Latin Pop before, you can sort of intuitively tell is exactly how it all sounded.

But even with these strictures, Robi Draco Rosa at this young age already makes clear the direction he wants to take musically.  "Cruzando Puertas" may not feel out of place on Adult Contemporary, but there's also an insistent melancholy and anxiety on it that would set the template for all his music to come.  Just the fact that it is called Frio (Cold) tells you what this warm-blooded Latino was already feeling.  The album is a subtle warning shot of what was shortly to come to pass.

Overall, Robi Draco Rosa is a singularity. He was a major force behind Latin Pop music while also distinctly apart from it.  He helped launch Ricky Martin's career even as he walked away from something similar for himself.  And what's better, he never stopped being himself, in all his iterations.  There's just something so relieving, so refreshing, about being around people (even if only in through their music) who are nothing but themselves, in everything they do.  If for that reason alone, I'm glad I caught up with him.

My Letter to the University of Iowa Board of Regents

Recently the grad student Union here at Iowa made its offers to the Board of Regents--it included such standard fare as 4.5% raise and better health insurance, as well as much more overdue demands like eliminating grad fees once and for all.  Then, at a meeting on Monday that was well attended by the Union, a rep for the Board of Regents offered their counter proposals, which included eliminating full-tuition reimbursements for quarter-time grad students, no salary increase, and not even addressing the fees.  The Union wanted better, the Board offered worse.  Needless to say, this did not sit well with the Union.

Now, I recognize that the point of the meeting wasn't to begin negotiations--the Union high-balled (for example, the Union also asked for health insurance to cover sex-change operations, which they have to know won't happen anytime in the near future), and the Board low-balled, and hopefully the two will negotiate and compromise between the two offers before March (which is when arbitration would have to begin).  Nevertheless, some of my fellow classmates, rather than waiting on the Union arbitrators or on the humanity of the Board of Regents, decided to be proactive and send letters directly to the Board members themselves.  I decided to join them, and below is what I wrote.   We haven't gotten any responses (yet), but I like the idea that they start feeling points of pressure from multiple sources, to let them know that the grad students aren't just passive participants in these proceedings, that we really do mean business (and with the University of Oregon grad students following through on their threat to strike, Iowa better realize that we're no slacktivists, either).

My classmate who inspired me to write the Board focused on the tight financial straights of being an English grad student, appealing to their humanity; while I liked her letter, I decided to take a different approach, so that, you know, they get hammered by a variety of different arguments to appeal to different personalities.  As such, my letter focuses more on the diminished returns of having overworked, underpaid grad students teaching the only required Rhetoric course to our undergrads:

Dear Board of Regents

My name is Jacob Bender, an English PhD student here at the University of Iowa, and a Rhetoric 1030 instructor. I am writing you about the proposed new graduate student contract. I do appreciate your predicament: budgets are tight, we're not out of the recession yet, you must juggle many competing interests, and the recent shenanigans at UNI have helped no one. But supporting our grad
students is integral to the mission of the university.

Here at U. Iowa, the undergraduates sit on the knife's edge, since (unlike most colleges) there is only one Rhetoric class required, not two. I have graded papers of upperclassmen, where I've found that many students here graduate without basic composition skills, which jeopardizes their ability to succeed in their other classes, graduate on time, and find jobs post-college. I am keenly aware that if I don't teach my students how to write well, then likely no one will.

Yet even as my colleagues and I shoulder the heavy responsibility of preparing our bewildered students for 4 years of successful college writing, we are also expected to take a full graduate course load, research, publish, attend conferences on tiny budgets, pay rent in the most expensive city in Iowa--and in many cases, due to graduate fees that cut into our sub-poverty-line stipends, we either work second jobs or garner further student debt. In such circumstances, even grad students with the best of intentions can find themselves demoralized and treating their students as afterthoughts.

Simply put, underpaying and overcharging grad students shortchanges undergraduates of a quality education, which undercuts the mission of the university, and contributes to the alarming larger trend of our students graduating unprepared for the job market.

Now, neither I nor my colleagues entered this program naive, none of us expect to make money while in grad school. We are in fact grateful for the opportunity to study here. But since we fulfill such an integral function of the educating mission of this university, then please, for the sake of our students if no one else, remove our graduate fees once and for all and offer us a liveable stipend, so that we can better focus on teaching our classes, finishing our education, and representing this University.

One more item: at the Open Negotiation meeting yesterday, one representative for the college indicated that he was not worried about Iowa's competitiveness in attracting top-tier grad students, since Iowa offers one of the higher stipends in the Big 10. This statement bewrays an ignorance of the fact that Iowa does not just compete with the Big 10; I myself am from Washington state, and applied to schools throughout the Pac-12, the Rocky Mountains, and New England. Of the schools that accepted me, I picked Iowa in part due to its compensation package (though I was ignorant of the fees). That is, you are not competing with the Big 10 for top tier grad students, you are competing with everyone--and if you truly want Iowa to be a top tier institution, then offering top tier compensation is an important first step.

I've already taken too much of your valuable time, for which I thank you. Keep up your hard work, and I mean that sincerely.

Regards

Jacob Bender

Weezer: Bring Back Matt Sharp!

A sort of Confessions of an ex-Weezer fan.

Following a surprisingly high number of positive (if still qualified) reviews, I did something I haven't done in nearly a decade: I gave the new Weezer album a chance.  

Courtesy of YouTube, I have now given several listens to Everything Will Be Alright In The End.  Part of me wants to just let myself like it, to kick back and enjoy it on its own terms, and quit trying to compare it to their '90s output (even as lead-single "Back to the Shack" openly--and rather foolhardily--invites those comparisons).

But on the other hand, Weezer still has a LOT of sins to atone for.  Make Believe alone nearly cancels out The Blue Album. Raditude almost erases Side B of Pinkerton.    

You have to understand that there was a point in my life--right around when I graduated High School (and The Green Album came out)--when I actually considered Weezer my favorite band.  Like many of my immediate generation, I listened to their legendary 1994 debut The Blue Album more times than is strictly healthy--it was a sort of punk rock for nerds, introverts, the shy yet passionate; how many times have I quit a terrible job with a triumphant "The workers are going home!"; how often have I felt to turn my back on the rat-race with the life-affirming (and eco-critical) "You take your car to work, I'll take my board/and when you're out of fuel, I'm still afloat..."; "Undone (The Sweater Song)" recalls some of my friendliest childhood memories; and 1996's Pinkerton is perhaps the most honest assessment of an awkward young man's libido ever committed to CD.  

 

Such was the goodwill bought by those 2 brilliant albums that, like far too many Weezer fans my age, I greeted their 2001 comeback The Green Album with joy, rather than the shrug that that 28-minute generic-a-thon probably deserved (hit-single "Island In The Sun" notwithstanding).  

A year later, after an unprecedented fan-outreach gimmick that had fans voting online for which new tracks to include, I bought 2002's Maladroit the day it came out, which I'd never done before nor since.  Yet even clear back then, we long-suffering Weezer fans were already having to convince ourselves to "enjoy this music for what it is", rather than compare it to their '90s classics--for the truth was that Green and Maladroit didn't compare to those first twin masterpieces at all--and in our all-too-rare honest moments, we had to admit that, as breezy fun as Green and Maladroit could sometimes be, that if it hadn't been for Blue and Pinkerton, we never would have bothered to check them out in the first place.

Yet still we soldiered on, dutifully purchasing Weezer's new albums and requesting their newest singles on local radio stations--not for what they were doing, mind you, but what we all expected, all hoped, that they would do.  There had been a 5-year hiatus after Pinkerton you see--an album critically and commercially reviled in '96, before finding second-life as a deeply-revered cult-classic spoken of only in hushed, reverent tones.  We all believed that Weezer was still just brushing off the cobwebs, getting their mojo back, regaining their confidence with these tepid new albums after Pinkerton's frightful rejection--that after tentatively testing the waters and trying their fans' devotion, they would in short order produce another Blue--or even (we dared dream!) another Pinkerton.

Then I went on my mission, where I thankfully learned to care about things far more important than mere music fandom.  Weezer apparently took another hiatus as well, for upon my return from Puerto Rico I was informed that Weezer still hadn't released anything since Maladroit.  It was when I returned to college that Weezer finally dropped their long anticipated follow-up, Make Believe.

The kindest thing I can say about that-which-will-heretofore-remain-nameless is at least I didn't pay money for it (a roommate burned me a copy).  Oh I tried, for old time's sake, I really tried to like it!  I tried to read "Beverly Hills" as some sort of cheekily-subversive parody of our celebrity-worshiping culture, rather than a symptom of it; I tried to unironically sing-along to "You're My Best Friend"; and I tried to treat "We Are All On Drugs" as an intentional joke.  

All for naught.  Here at last I could make no more excuses for them, my long-suffering patience was at an end, the last of my '90s-era goodwill was officially burned away--I had to confess, these songs were just plain awful.  The lyrics were trite, lazy, juvenile, and hackneyed; the musicianship was cliched, uninspired, and overwrought; to quote Napoleon, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder!

My goodness, they take another hiatus and this is the best they could come up with?  Serious, their Harvard-grad frontman took a long, hard look at the direction his band was taking, and his brilliant solution was to go even dumber?!  Sweet Mercy, the subpar Green and Maladroit (which merely felt impersonal, not idiotic) were mid-period masterpieces compared to this dreck.  The overplay of "Beverly Hills" and "We Are All On Drugs" is part of why I finally quit listening to the radio altogether.  Besides, far more interesting and innovative bands--TV on the Radio, the White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Andrew Bird, etc--were arising out of the indie world at the time, so I broke up with Weezer, turned off the radio, and never looked back.  

Which I never regretted.  I was of course peripherally aware of when The Red Album and Raditude and Hurley and assorted B-Side collections came out over the ensuing years; I think I gave each album's lead-single a cursory listen on YouTube, if for no other reason than to confirm that there was no reason to return to them.  It was like periodically learning about how far your ex has descended into a downward spiral--you feel sorry for them, even as you're glad that you got out of that relationship when you did.

But apparently Weezer was self-aware this entire time they were collapsing into self-parody.  2014's Everything Will Be Alright In The End is a self-conscious attempt to woo back the original core of Weezer fans who jumped ship clear back in the mid-aughts.  And like any ex, I find myself unexpectedly open to their wooing, to their offers to forget the sordid past and get back together, to love like we used to. 

Yet even as they winkingly sing "Let's rock like it's '94", I can't help but remember how much better their actual '94 music was (I never threw away The Blue Album after all).  I also can't help but imagine about how much more meaningful this disc would've been if they'd released it, say, a decade ago, or even 15 years ago.  Back then I might have thought they were finally getting their act back together, recovering their mojo.  But now it's far too late--I've known for awhile that they're not the same Weezer.

And why?  What happened between 1996 and 2000, that began their long, excruciating slide into mediocrity?  Why didn't they get better with age (as one might expect)?  I've been using break-up analogies here half-facetiously, but the truth is, an actual break-up did in fact occur within Weezer post-'96, and it's the X-factor that has been missing from and haunting Weezer ever since.

His name is Matt Sharp.  He was the bassist on their first two albums.

It's so easy to forget the bassist, isn't it.  Especially in a Rock band, the bassist is just who keeps the beat, maybe gives some backing vocals.  Meanwhile, Rivers Cuomo is the lead singer, lead guitarist, primary song-writer for Weezer--Weezer was always kind of the Rivers Cuomo band, so Matt Sharp was easy to dismiss.

Nevertheless, Matt Sharp was the bassist for Weezer on Blue and Pinkerton--and not on any subsequent album.  Not coincidentally, every non-Matt-Sharp album has sucked.

Sharp was clearly doing something to elevate the band--if he maybe was not outright writing these songs, then clearly something about his personality, his aloofness, his goofiness, his coolness, his self-confidence, was grounding and driving and challenging Rivers Cuomo as a songwriter in a manner that he has clearly never experienced since.

Serious, pay especial attention to Matt in the videos for "Buddy Holly" or "Say It Ain't So" or "El Scorcho" or "The Good Life" or even his image 3rd-from-the-left on The Blue Album's cover art--there's just an ambiance about the dude that transcends the group's whole "nerd-band" schtick, to elevate them to something truly astonishing.  I think it is fair to say that Matt-Sharp-Weezer is an utterly different band from Matt-Sharp-less Weezer--and when I say I was once a Weezer fan, I mean only of Matt-Sharp-Weezer.

I of course don't know why Matt Sharp left Weezer--maybe it was to spend more time with his own band The Rentals; maybe the first hiatus lasted too long and he just drifted away; maybe Rivers never got along with Matt; maybe Matt didn't get along with him.  Who knows and who cares.  All I know is this:

Weezer, if you are truly serious about wooing me, if you actually want me back, then you must first woo back Matt Sharp.  I'm dead serious here.  Contrary to the lyrics of "Back in the Shack," the problem was never that Pat wasn't playing drums or Rivers wasn't on lead guitar, no, not by a long shot--the problem was that Matt Sharp wasn't on bass.  You will never have actually returned "back to the shack" until Matt has rejoined you there.  In a sense, calling The Green Album their 2001 comeback is a misnomer--Weezer has never actually come back, because Matt Sharp was never with them.  

We are in fact still waiting for Weezer to get back together--all this time, we've actually only been listening to 3 guys who used to be in Weezer, performing covers of old Weezer songs, trying but failing miserably to write new songs in the same style.  The fact that the current line-up is 3/4ths the old Weezer is of no avail; I for one am no longer fooled; Weezer's post-Pinkerton hiatus is still not over, and will not be over, until Matt Sharp returns to bass.

Weezer, for your own sake, please: Get back together with Matt Sharp!  Bury any hatchets you have with him.  Offer him more money, give him partial song-writing credits, show up at his door with flowers and chocolates and a grand parade carrying streamers and banners reading "I'M SORRY PLEASE COME BACK", do what you gotta do.  For it's not us, your old fans, that you need to woo back Weezer.  It's Matt Sharp.

David Foster Wallace on Voting

Bracketing aside for now whether you were maybe gladdened or saddened by last night's Midterm election results, the record-low voter participation indicates that the majority of Americans were pretty indifferent towards the whole ordeal.  On the one hand, it's hard to fault the apathetic: amidst the relentless barrage of hateful political-ads rife with inaccuracies, ad hominum attacks and other assorted logical fallacies, amidst all the long-broken campaign promises and the candidates sold to the highest bidder, amidst all the compromised principles--or worse, toxic uncompromising petulance--it is of course all too easy to become cynical, pessimistic, depressed, despairing, and ultimately apathetic, as a defense mechanism against the whole sordid shebang. 

But on the other hand, that's exactly how the powerful want you to respond.  I quote someone far more articulate than I, the inimitable David Foster Wallace (post-modern novelist extraordinaire), who, clear back during Election 2000, wrote the following for Rolling Stone:

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote." -DFW

 There really is no such thing as not voting.  For the party faithful will always vote, you see--and all that's diluting their votes right now is the rest of us.  That's why they run hateful attack ads, specifically to turn you off, so that only their votes count each election by default!  Now, maybe some elections we really are just voting for the lesser of two evils--but don't for a second assume that that difference in degree does not matter.  

For what would happen if we all exercised our rights to vote?  I'm not sure we've ever actually ran that experiment.  That alone could be revolutionary.

 Which reminds me: Happy Guy Fawkes Day.  Remember remember the 5th of November...

In Praise of November Holidays

Back when I interned as a reporter in Guadalajara, Mexico, my editor (this charming yet cheeky Englishman from east London) wrote a breezy little op-ed about how all his favorite holidays are the November ones.  Now, I can scarcely  remember even my own articles I wrote that Fall (newspapers are written to be forgotten, after all); but for whatever reason, that little op-ed has stuck with me all these years.

The gist of his article was that, for whatever reason of random statistical clustering, November is when the quirkiest holidays come out to play.  Take for instance today, Nov. 2nd, the Day of the Dead: this is the day when Mexicans all across their Republic celebrate death--not fear, not mourn, not despair over it--but celebrate it!  Death in Mexico is not a fiend, but a friend; not an enemy, but a relative (though some might say "same difference").  They throw parties, they gather with their loved ones, they sing, they dance, they share good drink and good company; they set up shrines to their dearly departed, not to grieve them, but to include them in the festivities.

Contrast this against U.S. Halloween, wherein we fetishize death as intrinsically dark, evil, foreboding, "spooky," a corrupter and stranger to be feared.  Ghosts for us are always unwelcome, unfamiliar, malevolent; we are so unused to the presence of the dead, we think about death so little, that when it actually appears directly before us we refuse to acknowledge its existence--so we have to mock it, dress up in it, make a bunch of kitsch out of it in order to convince ourselves that it doesn't actually exist when it does.

Let me be clear: I actually love American Halloween.  I love that we have at least one macabre moment each year when us youth-worshiping Americans acknowledge the inevitability of death (no matter how obliquely hidden behind slutty-witch outfits, schlocky horror films, and drunken costume parties).  But something about the Mexican Day of the Dead strikes me as being ultimately healthier, as a much more psychologically-sound approach towards facing one's own mortality--as a celebration, not a funeral; as a beloved companion, not a haunting enemy; as an everyday part of life, not an evil to be sequestered off once a year when the dying leaves finally force our attention.

Then take Nov. 5th, Britain's Guy Fawkes Day: in the words of my old English editor, this is the day when his countrymen celebrate what they have all contemplated doing but only one of them has had the guts to attempt: blow up Parliament.  In 1605 you see, Guy Fawkes was caught planting barrels of gun-powder under the Parliament building, in a frankly-ballsy bid to take out the Catholic-repressing government in one fell swoop.  King James I initially instituted the holiday to celebrate Fawkes' failure; but whatever political overtones first permeated the holiday, the anti-Catholicism and pro-Monarchism have long faded out of historical memory, while the bonfires, effigy-burning, and fireworks have all stubbornly stuck around.  Clearly there is something deeper going on here.

For the holiday just seems so uncharacteristic of the English, a people who are renowned the world over for their stodginess, reserve, and unspectacular stability of government.  But for one glorious night each year, the English--the same people, mind you, who forced the Magna Carta on King John in 1215, marched on London in the Peasant Revolt of 1381, rallied around the Jack Cade rebellion of 1450 and Kett's Rebellion in 1549, declared independence in 1776 (we were English colonists, after all), not to mention produced Monty Python's Flying Circus, embraced Punk Rock in the late-70s, and returned "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" to the pop-charts when Margaret Thatcher died--these same English let loose the simmering anarchic side that had been slyly hidden behind that stiff upper lip all along!

Contrast Guy Fawkes Day with, say, the 4th of July, which was always a much more straightforwardly patriotic affair.  Now, I love fireworks as much as the next bloke; but even with the 4th's roots as a violent declaration of war on the central government, it's difficult for me to contemplate our premier national holiday slowly morphing over time into some delightful celebration of trying to blow up Congress (not that many Americans couldn't get behind that...).  There really isn't a U.S. equivalent to Guy Fawkes Day, and I just find it so deliciously ironic and appropriate that the English, of all people, are who observe it!  Once again, the November holidays are the quirkiest.

Now, I've taken a couple pot-shots on the good ol' U.S. of A. here, but we have a pretty uncharacteristic November holiday as well, in Thanksgiving.  We Americans, to put it charitably, are not known for our graciousness.  We took the celebration of the birth of Christ, of He who overturned the tables of the moneychangers, and commercialized it into the most materialistic holiday of the year. We are less than 5% of the world's population yet produce a quarter of its waste.  We constantly demand bigger, better, faster, newer, and sooner. Giving thanks is generally not our M.O.

But then comes November!  For one weekend every year, wedged right between the gluttonous diabetic-shock of Halloween and the budget-crisis of Christmas, we have a family dinner with no other express purpose than to give thanks for what we have!

Now, that fat turkey is arguably still representative of our infamous gluttony; nevertheless, on Thanksgiving we don't submit wish-lists; we don't party; and we don't even have all that much to commercialize.  Outside that turkey, the only other recognized Thanksgiving tradition is, well, going around the table giving thanks for what we have!  It is a welcome and much-needed break from our relentless  and insane pursuit of acquisition; it provides some much needed perspective of how good we have it--even if that perspective scarcely lasts more than a weekend, at least we get it once a year.  There is no other holiday like it--and like Mexico's Day of the Dead and Britain's Guy Fawkes Day, it comes in crisp, glorious November.

So, like my old English editor in Mexico, I now raise my goblet to the November holidays; when the quirkiest parts of all our national characters come to light; when our better nature's are allowed full expression; when the final descent of Autumn into Winter ironically causes us not to close down with the cold, but to instead open ourselves up all the more, like we all too rarely let ourselves do. (This, perhaps, is why Jimmy Eat World sings "I hope for better/in November...")